Micro-robots unveiled

spiffy1 writes "A group of Japanese electronics corporations, (Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Matsushita) have developed a 5mm by 9mm by 6.5mm robot. These robots will be used to inspect and repair power plants without need for shutdown. They can zoom between tiny pipes and wires at the rate of 2mm per second, lift nearly 1 gram, and link up with other robots to accomplish bigger tasks. "

Similar to Fractal Shape Changing Robots

I forget where I first saw this (it might have been /. I dunno). On Freak Tech, I found the URL for FSCRs (Fractal Shape Changing Robots).

http://www.stellar.demon.co.uk/#introduction

Not quite the same thing, but similar. The FSCRs allow for multiple robots ganging together for more difficult tasks.

I wonder how long those Micro-robot critters can run without power?

Did you hear?

Sony will be selling a bunch of those as an add-on to their Aibo, so they can have robo-fleas :)

This sounds suspicious.

The URL looks legit, but there are a number of practical problems with the robots as described:

• 2mm/sec?
  
  At that rate, they'd move 7.2 metres (23.4 feet) per hour. Power plants and industrial facilities are *big*. Unless you saturate one with bugs, your robots will take days to reach their destinations.
  
  
• Lithium or NiCad?
  
  What's powering these suckers, if they take days to go anywhere? Either one of several unlikely broadcast power schemes is being used, or they're tethered, or they can't go more than a few tens of metres before their batteries run out.
  
  
• What exactly are these supposed to do?
  
  The robots as described would have an interesting time actually fixing anything. Especially on battery power. The most useful application that I can think of would be to use them as remote cameras to see what's going wrong, but there are easier/more practical ways of doing this (put a motorized video camera on a ceiling track, for instance, and use faster tethered robots or just something like a proctoscope for getting into the pipes).
  
  

This is an incomplete list, but you get the idea. IMO, this is either a hoax or else the article has significantly munged many of the details.